“The Impersonal You”: Mass Print and Other Communication Technologies in the Virtual Friendship of Harriet Beecher Stowe and George Eliot

The relationship between Harriet Beecher Stowe and George Eliot, widely recognized as one of the most significant literary friendships in the 19th century, yet rarely focused on in scholarship beyond mutual literary influence, took place entirely through the communicative media available then: mass print, the Victorian post, and the social network of parlor literature and transatlantic literary community. The article analyzes the beginning of the correspondence, both similar to and different from fan mail exchange, with extensive quotes from Stowe’s unpublished second letter, to demonstrate an innovative theoretical point that novels can function as part of a communicative continuum between a writer and an individual reader, becoming instruments of what may be seen as a proto-virtual relationship.